Andy Murray's new coach Ivan Lendl demanded fitness as a player and may expect the same as a coach

There may be those who look at the nicknames from Ivan Lendl’s playing days,
which include “Ivan the Terrible” and “The Terminator”, and fear that Andy
Murray has engaged a humourless robot as his new coach.

It is true that Lendl used to be portrayed as an emotionless ball-striking clone – a picture that evolved from his Eastern European background and his rivalry with feisty John McEnroe. But this was always a convenient image rather than an accurate one.

In fact, Lendl is a keen practical joker, if sometimes a rather fierce one. Just ask Mark Philippoussis, one of Australia’s finest recent talents, who went to train at Lendl’s house as an impressionable 17 year-old.

“I remember I gave him an easy forehand and pointed up at the sky so that he could throw up some lobs for me to smash,” Philippoussis said. “Instead he just came in and smacked the ball right at me, as hard as he could. That is Ivan’s way of joking, his sense of humour.”

Lendl’s return to the front line of tennis was welcomed on Sunday by his former coach Tony Roche. As the French Open champion of 1966, Roche is another rare example of a great player who turned to coaching once his own career had finished.

“People have always had the wrong impression of him,” Roche said of Lendl. “He’s a fun guy, you know, great company, someone who was completely different to the person you saw on the court. That was his office between those lines and he went out there with a job to do.”

Lendl’s record was extraordinary. He won eight grand slam titles, the same number as Fred Perry and Jimmy Connors. He was world No 1 for 270 weeks, and beat McEnroe in 21 of their 36 meetings. But more than that, he reinvented the way the whole game was played.

According to David Foster Wallace, the award-winning writer: “Ivan Lendl was the first top pro whose strokes and tactics appeared to be designed around the special capacities of the composite racket. He could pull off radical, extraordinary angles on hard-hit groundstrokes, mainly because of the speed with which heavy topspin makes the ball dip and land without going wide.”

The remorseless consistency of Lendl’s game was based around his work in the gym — another area where he started a trend. “He was one of the first players who brought that fitness thing to tennis,” says Philippoussis, a lifelong admirer. “Whereas Bjorn Borg would grind for hours on the court in training, Ivan would be in the gym.”

“Ivan was always looking for the edge, even in the smallest ways,” adds Roche. Perhaps this obsessiveness of his approach helps to explain why, after a bad back forced Lendl out of tennis in 1994, he did not return to the game for 16 years.

In the meantime, he turned his extraordinary focus on golf, achieving a handicap of “plus two” — which is better than scratch. He won an event on the Celebrity Tour, managed the careers of his three talented golfing daughters, and once received a wild-card into the Czech Open but failed to make the cut.

Since undergoing surgery on his troublesome back, Lendl has picked up his racket again, turning out occasionally on the ATP Champions Tour last year.

“I can play now for three days in a row,” he told the New York Times at the end of 2010. “But I still have to rest for two days afterwards.” Will he do the hitting in training sessions with Murray? Perhaps, but either way Lendl’s real contribution will lie in the mental steel he brings to the partnership.

As Roche puts it, “The way [Lendl] worked on his game as a player, the way he prepared himself – all of that knowledge and experience is in Andy’s corner now.”